Congratulations to Fred Comeau for successfully completing his Ph.D. Candidacy exam. Fred is an interdisciplinary Ph.D. student with CS as his home department, and his thesis research is in the area of Knowledge Representation, on Concepts and Prediction Machines. He came to our lab after the retirement of his original advisor, David Scuse.

We just came back from FIRA RoboWorld Cup 2018 which was held in Taichung, Taiwan, August 6-12. We competed with both large (adult size) and small (kid size) robots led by Prof. John Anderson and Post-Doctoral Fellow Dr. Meng Cheng Lau with the four Computer Science Undergraduate Students who went to the competition, adult size: Mario Mendez Diaz and Li Buroi, kid size: Christian Melendez and Louis O’Connor. Other members who contributed and remained at the lab were CS PhD candidate Amirhossein Hosseinmemar, ECE M. Sc. student. Ziang (Daniel) Wang, and Undergraduate CS Students Chi Fung (Andy) Lun, Kurt Palo, and Bo Chen.

We placed just out of trophy range - fourth overall - in both leagues, by winning five awards in a range of events.

We just got back from our first appearance at the Amirkabir University International Robotics Competition (AUTCup) in Tehran, Iran. We took first overall in both divisions (kid and teen size) of the Hurocup league. Pictured above-left is our Post-Doctoral Fellow Meng Cheng Lau (Center) with the two Computer Science Undergraduate Students who went to the competition, Mario Mendez Diaz (Left) and Jin (Dylan) Park (Right).

There were more than a hundred participants across all the leagues in the competition, from eight countries: Iran, Canada, Taiwan, Malaysia, Korea, Mexico, Brazil, and Germany. The many leagues included everything from wheeled robots to drones, but our entries involved the FIRA HuroCup - this is a multi-sport event for humanoid robot athletes, in which the same robot must be used in all events. To win the overall competition a team must perform well across a range of events, each of which challenge different aspects of control, perception, and planning. We will be participating in the main FIRA HuroCup event in Taiwan later this summer, so this was a useful test of our work so far at a local level.

We competed with both large (adult size) and small (kid size) robots. Each of these leagues had mainly similar events but with a few differences. The overall results for our team (the SnoBots) were:

Kid Size:

Archery - First Place

Archery with Moving Target - Second Place (New Event)

Sprint - First Place

Long Jump - First Place

Weight Lifting - First Place

All-round - First Place (Second Place: Iran, Third Place: Brazil)

Adult Size:

Archery - First Place

Archery with Moving Target - First Place (New Event)

Downhill Skiing - Third Place (New Event)

Sprint - First Place

Long Jump - First Place

All-round - First Place (Second Place Iran, Third Place: Korea/Taiwan)

While even with significant support from Amirkabir we could only send three representatives, these entries represent a major period of work in our laboratory by many people. In addition to Professor John Anderson and the members of the lab who went to the competition, this includes Amir Hosseinmemar, Ph.D. student, Chi Fung (Andy) Lun, 4th year CS Undergraduate, Kurt Palo, 2nd year CS Undergraduate, and Ziang Wang, ECE M.Sc. Student. Congratulations everyone on this great result. Now we move to work on RoboCup, in Montreal, and the main FIRA HuroCup, in Taiwan, both later this summer.

We will be competing at the FIRA HuroCup 2018 in Taiwan, in July 2018! Interested in becoming a sponsor? Please Contact us!

About Us

The Autonomous Agents Laboratory is one of the research laboratories within the Department of Computer Science at the University of Manitoba, and is directed by Dr. John Anderson and Dr. Jacky Baltes. The goal of our work is the improvement of technology surrounding hardware and software agents as well as the development of applications employing these technologies. We are especially interested in cooperation in multi-agent settings, and the infrastructure necessary to support this and other forms of social interaction in intelligent systems.